12,318 research outputs found
Enabling Distributed Knowledge Management: Managerial and Technological Implications
In this paper we show that the typical architecture of current KM systems re.ects an objectivistic epistemology and a traditional managerial control paradigm. We argue that such an objectivistic epistemology is inconsistent with many theories on the nature of knowledge, in which subjectivity and sociality are taken as essential features of knowledge creation and sharing. We show that adopting such a new epistemological view has dramatic consequences at an architectural, managerial and technological level
BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report
This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design
The Gap Between Lifetime Fertility Intentions and Completed Fertility in Europe and the United States: A Cohort Approach
We study the aggregate gap between intended and actual fertility in 19 European
countries and the US based on a cohort approach. This complements prior research
that had mainly used a period approach. We compare the mean intended number
of children among young women aged 20 to 24 (born in the early 1970s), meas
ured during the 1990s in the Fertility and Family Surveys, with data on completed
fertility in the same cohorts around age 40. In a similar manner, we compare the
share who state that they do not want a child with actual cohort childlessness. Our
exploration is informed by the cognitive-social model of fertility intentions devel-
oped by Bachrach and Morgan (Popul Dev Rev 39(3):459-485, 2013). In all coun-
tries, women eventually had, on average, fewer children than the earlier expectations
in their birth cohort, and more often than intended, they remained childless. The
results reveal distinct regional patterns, which are most apparent for childlessness.
The gap between intended and actual childlessness is widest in the Southern Euro-
pean and the German-speaking countries and smallest in the Central and Eastern
European countries. Additionally, we analyze the aggregate intentions-fertility gap
among women with different levels of education. The gap is largest among highly
educated women in most countries studied and the educational gradient varies by
region, most distinctively for childlessness. Differences between countries suggest
that contextual factors-norms about parenthood, work-family policies, unemployment-shape women's fertility goals, total family size, and the gap between them
Seeking evidence for the role of ontological assumptions in the thinking of managers and professionals
Shingo's (1988) seminal innovation in the theory of production management can be
seen as a re-conceptualization of production as flow rather than transformation
(Koskela 1992). These alternatives can in turn be regarded as reflections of opposing
ontological positions which have dominated Western philosophy, holding respectively
that reality is constituted of either temporal process, or atemporal substance
(Roochnik 2004). Koskela & Kagioglou (2005) suggest that lean production
philosophy is based in a process ontology, radically different from the atemporal
metaphysics underlying conventional methods and theories.
Chi (1992) has argued that the disjunction between ontological categories such as
'substance' and 'process' can constitute a particularly acute barrier to understanding.
Studies such as Itza-Ortiz, Rebello & Zollman (2003) have demonstrated the
possibility of specifying and classifying learners' mental models as an aid to learning.
We examine procedures typically adopted in Quantity Surveying, Structural
Engineering Design and Project Planning, in order to specify the mental models
involved. We find evidence of an underlying substance ontology. Methods of
measurement used in Quantity Surveying are designed to account for physical, rather
than temporal properties. In design, the emphasis is on representing the properties of
the finished structure, rather than the processes by which it is constructed. More
subtly, the temporal dimensions of the construction process are represented in project
planning as 'lumps' of time, thus ignoring important facets of their nature as events.
We conclude that attention to the role of ontological categories in industry thinking
will facilitate the teaching of process oriented approaches to construction project
management
Open Domain Event Extraction Using Neural Latent Variable Models
We consider open domain event extraction, the task of extracting unconstraint
types of events from news clusters. A novel latent variable neural model is
constructed, which is scalable to very large corpus. A dataset is collected and
manually annotated, with task-specific evaluation metrics being designed.
Results show that the proposed unsupervised model gives better performance
compared to the state-of-the-art method for event schema induction.Comment: accepted by ACL 201
Recommended from our members
Capturing and Shaping Shifting Requirements using XML and XSLT: A Field Study
This paper explores Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) for authoring, presenting and managing system requirements. A field study is presented that explores the influence of XML schema and XSLT rendering and modeling templates on stakeholder communications. The study is of an e-commerce project where an evolving business model and changing partnerships forced the requirements team to continually adapt XML and XSLT tools to capture requirements. Coding procedures categorized resulting repositories of XML documents, XML schema, XSLT templates, stakeholder interviews, field notes, e-mails, and business documents. Qualitative techniques are applied to derive a model summarizing the influence of XML schema, and XSLT rendering and modeling templates. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed, including how XML tools support stakeholders by customizing presentations, assisting negotiations and enhancing traceability
Opportunistic Adaptation and New Venture Growth: Exploring the Link between Cognition, Action and Growth
This dissertation introduces the model of opportunistic adaptation to explain new venture growth. In established firms processes of change and adaptation usually imply a transition from one steady-state strategy to another and a problem oriented perspective as firms change in response to potential threats to their current positions. However, in the context of new ventures, adaptation is less about moving from one existent strategy to another and more about the entrepreneur’s effort to reach a steady state for the first time by continuously experimenting and combining resources in creative and innovative ways. The model of opportunistic adaptation rests on three key assumptions: 1.) new venture growth results from actions grounded in an opportunistic (proactive) logic; 2.) entrepreneurial cognition is viewed as an antecedent to all organizational actions leading to growth; 3.) the relationship between entrepreneurial cognition and action is influenced by industry and firm level attributes. The model is tested using quantitative and qualitative data on new ventures founded between 1996 and 2006 in technology intensive industries. The results provide partial support for the notion of opportunistic adaptation as a process in which entrepreneurial cognition, firm and industry related factors are closely intertwined. The results of the dissertation suggest that some aspects of entrepreneurial cognition, such as entrepreneurial schema focus have a more direct effect on actions related to new venture growth than others whose effect is strongly moderated by contextual influences such as industry growth and social network heterogeneity. This dissertation also finds that not all types of organizational actions associated with an opportunity logic lead to new venture growth. Of the three action types included in the model (fast, diverse and frequent) only action diversity was found to have a positive impact on new venture growth. Theoretical implications of the study results for both the literature on new venture growth and the literature on organizational adaptation, as well as practical implications are discussed
- …